Since the 1970s plastic bags have been replacing paper bags in the United States for the grocery and retail products industries due to the superior and inherent moisture resistant properties of plastic. For these industries, these plastic bags have been for the most part of the T-shirt type which provide laterally spaced handles integrally extending upwardly from opposed sides of an open mouth portion in the top of the bag to provide ease in carrying of the bag by the consumer. These T-shirt bags have generally been provided to and used by the grocery and retail product industries in the form of packs of a plurality of such bags secured together and mounted on a rack for consecutive detachment of the bags from the pack and for holding the bag in an open position for loading before removal from the rack.
The major problems encountered with these plastic T-shirt bag pack and rack systems has been the development of such a system that will adequately and efficiently provide a means for dispensing and loading bags made of ultra-thin plastic material that in many cases are very difficult and cumbersome to work with because of their flexible nature. These problems are compounded in cases where the person filling the bag with grocery or retail products is not trained or familiar with the particular bag/rack system, as is the case in many supermarkets and other stores where the turnover rate of employees is high or where the customer is required to bag his own items. This was particularly true where the bag/rack system required removal of consecutive bags from a pack mounted on a rack by a central mounting tab and stretching the handles of the removed bag over tabs on arm portions of a rack, such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,487,388 assigned to Mobil Oil Corporation.
A major break through with this problem came with the development of the QUIKMATE.RTM. bag/rack system which mounted a pack of thermoplastic grocery bags of the T-shirt type on a rack by a central mounting tab and by apertures in the handles of the bags, for supporting consecutive bags from the pack on supporting rods or arms on the rack in an open loading position by apertures in the handles on the supporting rods and for facilitating each removal of the consecutive loaded bags from the rack, as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,676,378 assigned to Sonoco Products Company (the assignee of the present application). This QUIKMATE.RTM. bag/rack system allowed consecutive bags to be opened by a single motion of the hand to break the central mounting tab on the front wall portion of the bag and pull the front wall portion of the bag open by sliding the bag handles having apertures therein along the outwardly extending support rods of the rack for loading of the bags. This QUIKMATE.RTM. system has been very successful in most applications once the person using the bag has practiced using the QUIKMATE.RTM. bag/rack system. This system has replaced most of the prior bag/rack systems in the grocery and retail products industries. However, there are still certain problems with the manual opening of consecutive bags with the QUIKMATE.RTM. bag/rack system where the user of the system does not break only the front side of each consecutive bag from the mounting tabs to properly position the bag in open loading position on the rack.